Harry Crews dies at 76; Southern writer with darkly comic vision

[bemildred]

Harry Crews, a rough-hewn Southerner who drew a keen following with novels that describe a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of grotesques — characters who are tossed into rattlesnake pits, walk on their hands, croon lullabies to a skull and literally eat a car — died Wednesday in Gainesville, Fla. He was 76.

The cause was neuropathy, according to his former wife, Sally Crews.

The word "original" only begins to describe Crews, whose 17 novels place him squarely in the Southern gothic tradition, also known as Grit Lit. He emerged from a grisly childhood in Georgia with a darkly comic vision that made him literary kin to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Hunter S. Thompson, although he never achieved their broad recognition.

Sometimes critics faulted him for letting perversity run amok ("… it's all too much and still not quite enough," a 1998 Newsday review said of one of his novels), but he was admired for his spare style, black humor and fierce imagination.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-crews-20120401,0,1537312.story